Ezra's Research

Before getting too much into the thick of things, I should should say who I am and what I'm doing.

I'm working on a doctoral project to help make a new language for web development at the University of Edinburgh. The thrust of the project is to combine best practices from a number of domains and present them in one coherent language—essentially, we want to mitigate the so-called "impedance mismatch" between different technologies that make up a given web system.

For example, web applications typically are backed by a database, but the database comes with its own language, SQL, for extracting data; one typically has to write a lot of glue code to repackage the data that comes from the DBMS for use within the main language that the system is coded in. Then, in order to create a rich user experience, you typically have to code in JavaScript, and again you have to repackage your data to make it work with JavaScript & the DOM. All these multiple representations for the same data wastes a lot of web developers' time. We hope to bring all these technologies in under one linguistic umbrella, and provide a more convenient way to express a complete web system.

Along the way, we might come up with some ideas and approaches that are useful in other contexts. So if these issues are interesting to you, even if you don't expect to adopt a new programming language anytime soon, I hope you'll subscribe and follow along.